


Common Ground

by AnnetheCatDetective



Series: Based on PR prompts and requests [9]
Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: (trans Hermine Gottlieb technically), Everyone is Trans, F/M, Trans Hermann Gottlieb, Trans Newton Geiszler, but I've been looking back at old kink meme prompts, everyone is bi, nothing hurts (except for all the time these nerds spend not getting along), this is the only way I'd write them as an M/F couple
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-01-25
Updated: 2017-02-03
Packaged: 2018-09-19 21:05:41
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,180
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9460385
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AnnetheCatDetective/pseuds/AnnetheCatDetective
Summary: Hermine knew it would be a disaster the moment she agreed to the meeting, but she'd hoped it wouldn't be.Newt was sure they'd get along famously, but then, he's always kind of a disaster.Working side by side, they might just get to work things out... but it's not the kind of thing that happens overnight.





	1. First Meetings and Flash Forward

**Author's Note:**

> Not my usual thing at all, since normally if I was going to play with the gender of one of the nerds, I'd change them both... but, the prompt for a trans-feminine Dr. Gottlieb having caught my eye, I was definitely interested in exploring what their relationship would be like if they were each sort of coming from the other side, gender-wise, and how their experiences would differ, how they'd be similar, and where they would get to a place where they would be comfortable enough talking about it to bond. 
> 
> No cheap accidental outings, not even through the drift, but a serious 'you've regained my trust and I want us to know each other better' deal. And no external transphobia because dammit I'm writing escapist fantasy here and I want them to be happy and unbothered, dammit.

Dr. Newton Geiszler was brilliant and passionate in his letters. It brought out a side of Hermine that nothing ever really had before-- it made her feel like someone understood. Maybe not everything, but being brilliant and being lonely, and being passionate about something, he understood those things and made her feel unapologetic in her own passions and interests and history of weirdness. If they had been the weird kids growing up, well now they were weird together, and it was wonderful.

 

He had such a wealth of work to his name that she was surprised to see a picture of him at last-- recent, and young, practically baby-faced, stubble and coke-bottle glasses aside... and incandescent. Even in a grainy group picture, Dr. Newton Geiszler, third from the bottom left, was something spectacular. His brilliance showed.

 

Her own body of published papers was less impressive, but at least it was all hers. Despite Lars' objections and her mother's fears, she'd begun her academic career as herself, no baggage from an old half-occupied life to drag her down, no other name on her work that she might cringe at looking back on or sending to a close colleague. No photographs that she appeared in prominently enough to make herself out-- at least, not tied to her professional life. There were pictures, and some of them she even liked, taken by her best friend-- her only real 'girl friend', and in fact, her ex-girlfriend-- pictures where she tried out different styles of clothing, makeup, new things done with her hair.

 

She didn't like all of them, and she didn't like any of them enough to send to someone with whom she had a scientific relationship, no matter how friendly. They didn't feel complete, somehow, authentic. They were all just early attempts at finding herself, in borrowed clothes that fit a bit awkwardly, and with hair she hadn't yet begun to grow out, and before her face had finished softening. But she was glad she had them, so that she could see herself coming together through the eyes of someone who cared about her enough to give her fresh options and enough to celebrate the little steps.

 

She'd found a comfort zone, where style was concerned, though it was difficult to find skirts long enough to suit her, outside of a couple of specially tailored ones. She had a look that was professional and academic and yet not without a feminine touch she could almost call cute. She wasn't unhappy with it at all, she just wasn't particularly confident, either. It was one thing to like herself, and a second, separate thing to expect others to like her, or even to notice her. She wasn't the focus of anyone's attention in the flesh, and to find herself on the other end of Newton's outpourings was intense.

 

Even when they didn't stray from the scientific, to have him put as much stock as he did in her replies was flattering. When the letters did verge on personal, she found herself taking frequent steps back to take stock of what he might have meant, whether he was trying to flirt, whether their relationship really was more than strictly professional. Worse, she couldn't always tell, rereading her own replies, which way she was responding. It was fantastic. It was heady. It was...

 

It was nice, more often than not. The feeling of being desired even in a purely mental capacity did make her feel more confident in her day to day life. She didn't feel the need to hunch in and make herself smaller, take up less space. She didn't care about going unnoticed in the world. She was going to save it, or help save it, and she deserved to take up as much space as was comfortable.

 

The letters were a comfort, when she left for the academy, a miserable process to go through, but with an end goal that was well worth it. She was happy to return the favor when he followed the next year, writing from her posting and telling him about life in the Shatterdome and what he had to look forward to.

 

It all fell apart, though, when they found themselves heading to the same city, and he asked to meet.

 

\---/-/---

 

She dressed to impress, professional as always, her hair growing out awkwardly from the short, utilitarian cut she'd worn at the academy. It hadn't been awful, having it short again, not with a bit of styling, it hadn't felt wrong to look at herself in the mirror and see it short... she'd had a couple of products, and devoted a little extra effort, and felt perfectly like herself, and she'd befriended Sasha, who'd had a similar cut at the time, who was also tall, and while she wanted to grow it back out, the awkward in-between stage was worse than short had been.

 

She'd done what she could, with the leftover styling products in her travel kit, with a little makeup, with her good skirt and a soft blue grid-patterned blouse with a peter pan collar, and the warm-colored sweater that skimmed over her curves just so, and she felt perfectly fine about her appearance-- fine for going out, fine for meeting a colleague, at least one she didn't have an embarrassing crush on-- but she wasn't going to kid herself. Fine was just that.

 

Newt had been late, inarticulate, manic. Newt had had tattoos of kaiju and a strong disliking for formality that rubbed the wrong way. All this she might have moved past, if he hadn't given her The Compliment. The impossible, over-the-top compliment that could not in a hundred years have been genuine.

 

Had he thought it was what she would want to hear? Maybe he didn't know her at all, if he did-- she wasn't blind, and she wasn't born yesterday, and he could have said so many genuine things about her brain instead of stooping to make up phony niceties about her looks.

 

She'd been cold, in response. He'd been hotheaded. Within minutes they were arguing about everything under the sun and tearing each others' theories to shreds. They were asked to leave the cafe, and she was in ugly tears before she got to her hotel room, but at least he hadn't seen them. He didn't write again.

 

\---/-/---

 

The next time Hermine sees Newton Geiszler, he's been transferred to the Vladivostok Shatterdome to work in the lab next door to her own. His tattoos have spread, and he's certainly no more well-groomed than before, perma-stubble still in place and hair loose from whatever style he might have attempted at the start of his journey over.

 

There's a silent agreement, passing between them in an instant, to not mention the enormous falling out they'd once had. She prefers his current distant demeanor to the overly-rambunctious, overly-familiar Dr. Geiszler of the past. For two whole days, she thinks maybe it will be fine after all, working one lab away from each other.

 

When he comes into the physics lab, he looks like death warmed over-- and not very warmed, either-- and he leans one hip against her desk and looks down at his hands, picking at one thumbnail.

 

"Can I help you, Dr. Geiszler?"

 

"What... what happened with us? We were good, you know? We worked. At least, we worked on paper. We were friends-- I thought. So... what fucked it all up?"

 

She winces and gives him a disapproving look at the casual profanity in a professional space. He pays absolutely no notice to it.

 

"You tell me." She shrugs at last, and returns to looking resolutely at her work.

 

"You froze me out. I don't-- I don't get what I did. I wasn't... I didn't mean to-- Look, if I made you uncomfortable, I wasn't trying-- I wouldn't have, like, done anything to... I dunno, flirt with you if you weren't feeling it, I wouldn't-- I'm not _that_ kind of an asshole. I didn't want anything from you, it was a compliment, and I get it if-- if most guys only say that stuff to get in your pants or whatever, I just don't have a filter, dude--"

 

"I'm not your 'dude'." Hermine snaps, and Newt does look up at her, at that.

 

"No. Sorry. Guess not." He studies her face a moment, the first time he's ever made eye contact with her for more than a fleeting glance. The first time they'd met, he couldn't seem to rest his gaze anywhere, and she'd been annoyed at the time, but now it feels like it might have been a blessing. The full force of it is intense.

 

"I don't have any answers for you, Dr. Geiszler--"

 

"Newt."

 

"You were unpleasant, I was unpleasant, it was unpleasant... is it worth trying to puzzle out?"

 

His focus flits off of her again, a hummingbird darting from flower to flower, roving over chalkboards and computers and filing cabinets. "I miss it sometimes, being able to write to someone who... who gets me. Gets part of me. Not a lot of people do. But if you don't miss it, then hey, I mean, I can go. I just... I didn't want you thinking I was hitting on you or something, if that was why you were upset. Like... that I didn't respect you because you were pretty."

 

"I wasn't." She says automatically, face heating. She can't believe he's going to persist in the lie. As nice as she thinks she looks, at least on a good day, she's come a long way from how she'd looked then. She'd gotten her hair out of that awkward phase, continued the slow progress to the woman she'd always envisioned herself being. She hadn't been all ugly duckling back then, no, but she hadn't been all swan, either.

 

"I just said it because I thought it, you don't have to believe it. It doesn't mean I didn't see you as a scientist first." He hops up from his lean against her desk. "You still do, by the way. Look like a model. Especially the sneer-- that's a high-fashion kind of contempt. If looks could kill..."

 

She glares at him. He dramatically clutches at his chest and pretends to keel over, straightening up and giving her a look when she doesn't laugh.

 

"You can't say I didn't try to make nice. Anyway, I'm sure I'll see you around." He heads for the door.

 

The two labs share a break room, but she makes a mental note to avoid it if it ever sounds like he's in there. It should be easy, he's not a quiet man.


	2. Putting Up Walls, Putting In Doors

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hermine is accustomed to being alone, and accustomed to telling people she prefers it that way. The defense system she's built up around herself, she'd always considered impenetrable... 
> 
> Newt finds a way to get in anyway. Even if it's just to get under her skin, it gets to be something.

The work is everything. It keeps her busy, occupied. Newton Geiszler is, predictably, a fierce annoyance, and she can't completely avoid him, though neither of them visits the break room with too much frequency. K-Sci has its own corner of the mess hall that has just settled into being theirs, and though there's certainly plenty of inter-departmental friendliness with most of J-Tech, the scientists still all gravitate to the same spot, and no one without at least some background in the sciences spends much time joining them.

 

Newt's schedule is erratic, Hermine cannot configure her own schedule around avoiding him, but by the same token, if she merely eats at sensible mealtimes, the odds are good he won't make an appearance, or will only drag himself in as she's leaving, in too much of a hurry to get his meal before there's not much left to strike up a conversation.

 

She can't remove him from her life, and whenever the question of whether she could comes up, she pushes it away. She could request a transfer, but she won't. She could have gotten rid of all of their correspondence, to, but with all the time since their disastrous first meeting, she never has. There's too much in those letters that might yet be important to their scientific efforts to trash it all in a fit of pique. It doesn't mean she's never considered it.

 

The problem is, Newt makes her feel so awkward, like she's still a young girl struggling to fit into her skin, to make it into her own. Her face flushes and her voice cracks when they argue, and it's not the professional face she presents to almost every other colleague she's ever had a disagreement with. It's not that no one else has ever had the power to dismantle her, but Newt is different. It isn't like fights with Lars, knowing he'll always see her as a child whenever she disagrees, or like the one professor she'd struggled with who had a way of singling out a student with an argument, of looking down his nose and finding weak spots. With Lars, well... there was a reason she didn't work with her father anymore. With the professor, she'd hated him, but she'd at least known she was learning from it, that she would be better in the future. With Newt, she's afraid to name it. Her feelings are too tangled up, the old admiration clashing against her opinion of his personal mannerisms and habits, his unprofessionalism, his whole 'bad boy of biology' persona that he couldn't quite live up to.

 

At least she could imagine they were on even ground there. He was no better at keeping up his own facade, he went red in the face as well, screeched and flailed and sputtered as he looked for words. If she couldn't look emotionless and professional, well he couldn't look cool and devil-may-care, either. It was cold comfort, but better than no comfort at all.

 

Freezing him out should have been easier, though, she can't help but feel. She'd frozen out plenty of people before, most of them fellow scientists who couldn't be reasoned with, who were personally distasteful to work with or impossible to engage in open debate, or who were just so pigheadedly wrong about a simple concept as to be beyond trying with. Lars was even one of them, ever since he began to slowly distance himself from K-Sci and the Jaeger Program, turning his eye to politics over science. Acting as though her faith in her own work was childish. Childish was trying to ingratiate oneself with the top brass in the hopes that when monsters overran the planet, they'd let you into their secret bunker to wait out the apocalypse. As if a kaiju would just get bored and go home once it had kicked down enough buildings!

 

Freezing Lars out meant she rarely talked to anyone in her family, and though she didn't talk to anyone else _about_ her family, though she'd deny it if asked, leaving them behind hurt. They'd been on her side, once. They'd been supportive of her transition, once her mother had gotten past the fear of whatever danger it might mean for her, that her siblings didn't have to face, once Lars got over himself and realized that she was no less his little shadow for changing the name he'd given her once, for wanting to look less like a clone of him. Once he'd realized she still had every intention of following in his footsteps, was not fundamentally different from the child he'd known, he'd been her fiercest defender, working to help every way that he could to make her transition easier, ready to use his forbidding glare to put even the most accidental offender in their place... And they'd all been so proud when she'd first worked on coding the Jaegers, when she'd gone to the academy-- her mother had worried again, of course, but ultimately, her family had been exactly what a family should be, in an ideal world.

 

Then again, the kaiju attacks were a pretty clear indication they weren't living in an ideal world.

 

She'd cut ties with so many people, she'd limited her contact with her family to the occasional terse emails to mother and siblings just to avoid giving Lars any possible power over her once they were on the outs... and now, Newt Geiszler is the one person she can't quite seem to delete from her life.

 

\---/-/---

 

Hermine is the last one in the physics lab, working late-- it's easier to tackle the equations the emptier the lab is, anyway, and she'd been working on modeling the breach with Doctor Winchester most of the day. Now, with the lab quiet, she can finally get back to her chalkboards, untouched since the night before, her calculations and predictions tugging at the corners of her mind, forming new connections, numbers lighting up the neural pathways as she finds her groove.

 

She assumes it's one of her colleagues coming back for some forgotten item, a phone or a tablet, when the heavy door opens-- it makes a scraping sound that, however familiar it's become, she can never seem to get used to, and she squeezes her eyes shut and grips the ladder tighter, waiting for it to close with a similar noise, so that she can get back to it. Footsteps approach the ladder, rather than any of the work stations set up around the lab, the silence stretches on, and when she looks down, it's to see Newton gazing up at her, his face unreadable.

 

Her own face flushes, and she goes to smooth her skirt, still holding the chalk in her hand, leaving a streak of white down the brown ponte knit.

 

"Hey." The corner of his mouth twitches, and doesn't quite become a smile.

 

"Doctor Geiszler." She nods, descending the ladder stiffly, returning the chalk to the tray and wiping the dust off onto her skirt with a sigh-- no point in trying to keep it free of more. "Can I help you?"

 

"They're shipping me out tomorrow night. Guess I've got everything done here they think I can do, samples are really deteriorating, so... it's back to Tokyo until the next time it's easier to move me than the kaiju."

 

"I'm sure it's normally easier to move you than a kaiju." She snorts.

 

"I wanted to tell you myself, I guess. Maybe it doesn't matter." Newt shrugs. "Maybe we're way past that, but... I dunno. Guess I got it into my head maybe I owed something to the Hermine I used to know. Try and wait until I'm out of the 'dome before you pop the champagne."

 

"Ah." She wishes she hadn't set the chalk down. Having nothing in her hands leaves her with the overwhelming urge to fidget-- and just what is she supposed to say to him? Would she have felt slighted if he'd left without saying anything, in light of what they meant to each other on paper? "Well. Thank you, for letting me know. Have a safe trip."

 

"Seriously-- what happened? And-- come on, don't, don't fob me off with this 'we were both unpleasant' bullshit this time, please. 'Cause maybe we don't get along and maybe me knowing what went wrong won't fix anything, but it's eating at me, dude--"

 

"Not your 'dude'. And maybe that is a part of it."

 

His eyes widen, and for a moment she thinks maybe she's shut him up, but it doesn't last.

 

"Okay. What's the rest of it, then? Like, I know I'm not great at people, but I thought things were, like... cool. And then they weren't. I just... I gotta know why. I don't have to make it cool again if you're not, but... understanding things is kind of... like... I just want the world to make _sense_. So just... I don't care if it starts another fight, we're pretty much past the point of no return there anyway, but be honest with me. Because from where I was sitting, it's like I got to know this incredibly cool person who was actually looking forward to meeting me, and then when I show up, all of a sudden you have this enormous chip on your shoulder. And I just, I need to _know_."

 

She nods, slowly. Wanting the world to make sense, she could understand.

 

"You... I don't know, maybe I did have a chip on my shoulder. Maybe I resented you being so comfortable, maybe that was a part of it. Certainly I was-- I got angry with you. You showed up, and you were so... so colorful, and so _loud_ \--"

 

"And you decided everything we had going on, you were just gonna toss it all because I wasn't going to tone myself down to be what everyone else thought I should be?" Newt challenges, puffing up a little.

 

"And I didn't want the attention!" She shouts back, feeling the tell-tale tightness in her throat, threatening to break. "I wasn't comfortable with it! I wanted a quiet lunch with someone I could talk to, privately, and you turned us into a spectacle! And you didn't care that it made me uncomfortable. I decided I was worth not-- not putting up with the childish antics of a man who didn't care about my comfort!"

 

Newt reels back, stricken, his wide, green eyes expressive. It makes her uncomfortable still, just how open he is. She'd thought for a while that it was some personal manifesto of his, that the loudness and the brightness and the in-your-face attitude was all part of some radical honesty nonsense, that he refused to hide any part of himself out of a misguided sense of being true to who he was. Now, she's beginning to think he couldn't hide if he wanted to. She's not ready to feel for him, but she can feel for that...

 

"I didn't know you were uncomfortable." He shook his head. "Just angry. And I couldn't figure out why."

 

"Well maybe if you'd paid as much attention to me as you were paying to your own self making a scene--"

 

"Excuse me for being dis-fucking-abled, I didn't _know_." He interrupts. "I couldn't _tell_. I couldn't tell until you were shouting at me that things were going wrong, okay? That's-- what I mean, when I say I don't get people, if I could figure out this stuff on my own I wouldn't have wasted so much time trying to _ask_ you. Fuck, if you'd just said-- I would have cared! I mean, I-- I care, that I did-- But you never said you were uncomfortable, you just insulted _me_!"

 

Hermine's mouth snaps shut. So maybe the uncomfortable openness was all part of it, two sides of the same coin. He couldn't choose what to project to others-- of course he couldn't, or he wouldn't look so ridiculous being his awkward, geeky self wrapped in the bad boy trappings, failing to walk the walk-- and he couldn't read what others projected.

 

"Well, I was uncomfortable." She says at last. "I didn't want strangers staring at me in public. I didn't want to be a part of a big scene. I didn't want anyone to notice me, except for you, I just-- I wanted to be invisible. I was barely getting used to going out in public, to any of it, to... to being a real person who existed outside of studying and working. I just wanted things to be nice, I wanted to not be so self-conscious for a little while so that you and I could talk, and instead so many people were staring, I-- you wouldn't understand."

 

She turns back to the chalkboard, but she's nowhere near where she'd last been working, and she doesn't know if she has it in her to climb the ladder again. She feels shaky and sick to her stomach, and it's a relief when Newt moves past her without another word, but a part of her isn't relieved. A part of her wishes he'd tried harder to repair it, knowing how she had felt.

 

He heads for the break room, not the corridor-- he must have come from some meeting elsewhere, or from packing his things, and not from the bio lab that opened onto the other end of the break room. Were they still working in the bio lab, or did he want to try to get more done while he could-- if he could?

 

She's still standing at the chalkboard when Newt returns, bearing a steaming cup of tea in one hand and a creamer cup and a couple of sugar packets in the other.

 

"Hey..." His voice is soft, for once. "Come on, no telling when we'll see each other again, so... start over? And-- I'm sorry. I didn't know, any of that. So... let's have a quiet, private talk."

 

She stares at the tea, and he shoves it towards her more insistently before she catches on. She winds up following him back to the break room anyway, not wanting to risk spills anywhere in the actual lab.

 

"Doctor Geiszler." She nods, smiling just a little and allowing him to pull her chair out. "Thank you."

 

"Thank you for agreeing to meet with me." Newt grins brilliantly at her, settling into the seat opposite. "How's work going for you?"


End file.
